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Twelfth Night - Night Vision: Art & Illusion Tour 1984 CD (album) cover

NIGHT VISION: ART & ILLUSION TOUR 1984

Twelfth Night

 

Neo-Prog

3.41 | 13 ratings

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Warthur
Prog Reviewer
3 stars This archival release captures Twelfth Night on the tour they undertook supporting the Art & Illusion mini-album (more of an EP, really), all of whose tracks are represented here alongside older Geoff Mann era material and some other new works, like the sinister Blondon Fair and an early version of Take a Look, which would be the big epic number on their Virgin Records album in a couple of years time.

Sourced from soundboard recordings, this album does not present one single show, but instead selects the best takes of each individual songs from a cluster of shows on the tour and uses them to reconstruct the full set list. Andy Sears seems a little more confident now as the band's frontman; he seems to have trouble judging the tone of the early section of We Are Sane (it's notable that, as the Corner of the World live recording attests, the band would eventually trim the early sections from the song), but really it would be difficult for anyone who wasn't Geoff Mann to pull off the dramatic performances demanded in the early stretches of the piece.

For the rest of the setlist, the new material sits nicely next to the old and comes across as a logical next step in the band's evolution. On top of that, with Art & Illusion troubling the lower reaches of the album charts, the band seemed to be right on the verge of a breakthrough. Little would they realise that trouble was ahead.

In addition, the main highlights of the setlist are still the old Mann-and-earlier era songs, which perhaps is too be expected given that they'd only done one mini-album with Sears (and some of the songs in that were performed by the Mann-era group!), but even so if you've been getting deep enough into Twelfth Night to trouble these live issues, you probably already have ample versions of these. It's a decent live set, but nothing to really radically change the destiny of the band - and it comes at a point when they were teetering between stagnation and misguided abandonment of their signature sound (eventually choosing the latter, as their Virgin album confirmed).

Warthur | 3/5 |

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